Asian Americans for Action

In 1969, Shizuko "Minn" Matsuda and Kazu Iijima founded the Asian Americans for Action (Triple A or AAA) in New York City. The two women were inspired by the Black Power movement and originally planned a Japanese American political and social action movement, but ultimately chose to make it a pan-Asian organization, inviting members of all Asian ethnic groups to join. The story goes that it was Iijima's son, Chris Iijima, who convinced them to broaden their focus. Triple A became part of the wider Asian American movement which channelled anger and discontent among Asian Americans during the 1960s and beyond. AAA was largely an East Coast movement, while a number of other Asian organizations, including the Asian American Political Alliance (AAPA), operated primarily on the West Coast. According to Iijima, AAA began with "two old ladies" sitting on a park bench worrying about their children's future. In fact, Matsuda was approximately 58 years of age and Iijima about 51 when they set up the organization in 1969. Iijima had been interned at the Topaz internment camp during World War II, while Matsuda had moved with her family to Utah before the war due to anti-Japanese hostility in the Bay Area. By the time they founded AAA, both had been involved in pro-Asian movements for many years. Born Kazuko Ikeda in California, Iijima grew up in Oakland and attended college at UC Berkeley. She encountered Marxist critiques of racism through her older sister and the Young Communist League at Berkeley, and became involved in radical politics. By 1938, she had helped to form the Oakland Nisei Democratic Club to encourage more Niseis to take up radical responses to working class issues and racism. She was still living and working in the Bay Area when Japanese Americans on the west coast were subjected to incarceration under Executive Order 9066. She was sent first to Tanforan Assembly Center and then to Topaz concentration camp in Utah. She married Tak Iijima in Utah (he had been drafted into the US Army just before Pearl Harbor), and was released to move to Mississippi with him soon after.